Since

Since I fell, the underside of the moon reflected the motion of my bricking boundaries. Everything beautiful you could have said started waltzing through my mind like the youthful memories you painted in the snow. Graciousness was lost on my obsolete threshold, but your proximity to my dreams was good enough for a chapter or two. 

I handed you my heart in a pile of books and I've missed you ever since. 

Calypso

They hadn't considered my ability to weave the web across the windows. I wasn't just a widow anymore, all adorned in the mourning for my past that had come so strongly when I found the nuisance of the city dissipating underneath my palms. Plated like Achilles, all guarded under Hades word, I strung underneath and around them like a knitting arachnid and a haunted memory. She was sick beside me. So sick she was with wondering that harkening to the realization that she made other people matter, by existing we made other people matter, when we kissed we made the world matter, she slept soundly as the fever's fervor pushed and pulsed with a carriage like the coming of the sun through her veins. Every night that it rained, the music blessed her skin with tears from the afterlife. I wept for her children that couldn't be mine, and I thundered through her lightning bolts like a monsoon. Together we were a storm.
We made the world matter when we darkened the skies and she never struck the same spot twice. You could hear me for miles, and you continue to judge your fate from the sound of my voice. I call to you and flock her light until the blackness of my clouds and the whiteness of her flashes become something of a postcard for the apocalypse.

Come home to me, Calypso. Come rain on my fire and put me to sleep.  

Autobody

It was over in seconds. She dropped the end of the string and began to recite spoken word in her native tongue instead of looking me in the eye like she used to when I loved her back. But she bit my tongue instead of having me speak out against her ethnographically denoting economy, pointing to the sunrise over the Pacific like we were hanging in Hawaii, and ignoring the point of the Mediterranean whatsoever.

“I need you,” she drew a wheelchair across the wall and scribbled her initials at the bottom. She crippled herself every night when the moonlight manufactured existentialism on yonder bare field. Black eyes and black religion, she never cared about her knives until I started telling her they were sharp.

It was over in seconds like she won and I lost. It was over before it began like I tied us to a pine tree a month before Christmas. It was over and she couldn’t forget my teetering fantasies that were lingering underneath her fingernails because she refused to clean them out.

I’m a dirty kind of machine. The autobody shops don’t fix my type anymore.

Hills

We found ourselves on a hill overlooking the sound of the ocean and the rocks kissing each other like tomorrow would never come. "Fuck me," she held her vomit right back from her teeth like it was biting back for all the times she had lied to her own mind. I couldn't stand the way she watched herself, all drunk and wishing for a memory, because I pushed my self off the upper story balcony so that I could be better for her someday. Odds were that she wouldn't be marked for or against their wandering forfeits, but "how old are you?" was the same as asking "what's your name?"


I'll never stop loving you.
I'll love you until the second that I die.

fucked with a knife

[FADE IN]

[Int. Bedroom. Nighttime.]

She is laying on the bed, her hair spread around her, in a corset, ripped at the seams, fraying around her. It is tied so tight that the skin on her chest is pooling at the top and her breathing is shallow. She has a long black skirt, pooling with fabric, covering her legs, but hanging off of her feet, which are dangling off the bed, a pair of worn heels are rocking back and forth as she moves her ankles. Her chest moves up and down rhythmically, quickly, as the flash of car headlights runs continuously over the walls. She is making music to herself, a tuneless melody, half-whistling, half-humming, while her eyes examine on the ceiling and her fingers twirl around the sheets beneath her.

The door opens, and man walks in. He has a cigarette in his mouth and he is holding a newspaper underneath his arm. The man looks at her and smiles. She looks at him back, blank.

SHE
Tell me something that will change my mind.

HE
I can't change your mind. You're stubborn.

SHE
Try.

She looks to the ceiling again, licking her lips. Her breathing is still shallow, and it's making a little noise when she inhales and exhales. It's soft, and the lack of air is making her cheeks rosy. He looks at her like she's a painting, trying to recognize the artist by the strokes of the brush on her skin. It was him all along, but he couldn't tell his own work.

He moves a portion of her skirt and sits on the edge of the bed. Her hand slides to his lower back, underneath his shirt, and taps the rhythm of the song she is humming onto his skin. He watches her feet swaying back and forth, the shoes swinging.
SHE
One thing, please. Just say one thing. 

HE
Who did this to you?

SHE
I think it was the artist.

HE

Ah…

She stops humming and rolls to one side. The lights are shining behind her, so her silhouette is mostly all you can see. As her legs close together, she winces, biting her lip before she speaks.
SHE
Do you like your head?

HE
It's skin on bone on brain. It's exactly like everybody else's. Nothing exceptional. Nothing mundane.

SHE
I'd like you to see yourself through my eyes. I think you'd probably fall in love too.

HE
I don't believe in love.

SHE
I should've liked to know you when you did.

HE
I dreamt that I met God last night. He told me something about the trees in the North, and the way that the nighttime sky watches you less than the daytime one. That's why people sin in the dark.

SHE
Will you lay?

HE
I'd rather not. 

SHE

I'm assuming you won't take me to God either. 

HE

Most likely.

SHE
He doesn't even remember my name now, probably. He's too busy getting lost in your stained glass eyes.  

She takes her hand from his skin and pulls him down by the fabric of his shirt. He lays still and she slides her fingers into his palm, pushing until his hand gives in and holds hers back. She doesn't smile. He does not look at her. They are silent.

SHE
I should probably go.

HE
It's too late for you too be walking around and it's too dark for me to be trying to figure out how to solve the details of your faces.

SHE
I've only got one face.

HE
Not right now. I've never seen this face on you before.

SHE
Kiss me.

He sits up slowly, pushing off of the bed so that he is facing her completely. His cigarette has gone out now, but it still is hanging from his lips. She watches him as he shifts until he is hovering over top of her, their faces close, her shallow breath blowing onto his lips. Her eyes begin to well and his lips charm up into a smile.

He begins to kiss her, starting at her bare shoulders and then her chest, down her corset, down her torso, to her hips; he hooks his fingers under her skirt and pulls it down, showing the garter belt underneath, all black lace, hooked onto her stockings. He pulls the skirt down more and a glint of light sparks off the inside of her thighs. Lowering his face, he withdraws, with his teeth, a cold, bloody knife, that is tucked into her stocking, immediately opposite an open wound made from when she rolled over.

He takes the knife from between his teeth and, starting at the top, cuts the corset all the way down the front. It falls open. Her skin has red marks from the pressed ribbing. He sits on his knees and examines her as she begins to hum again, sliding her hands up and down his arm, staring at the ceiling.
HE
You can't have my knife.

She takes the knife from his hand and holds it above her head.

SHE
Trade me for it.

HE
(smiling)
Fine.
(pausing)
I'll change your mind.

She holds the knife out to him.

SHE
Try me.

He takes the knife and tosses it off the bed, propped up on his knees, he pulls his cigarette case from his breast pocket, and takes one out. He lights it with a match, igniting it off the bottom of her dangling stiletto. She watches him slowly. He looks at her.

HE
Stay.

SHE
Alright.


[FADE TO BLACK]

Flyer

Before losing my wings, I got a feel for the fall. There wasn't a noise in the movie theatre other than my breathing because the sound of the film had cut out and I was the only one who stayed. I had an odd appreciation for the silent movie; it seemed that it wasn't shared by anyone on this coast at all. Breathing in and out and in...and out, I made the soundtrack on my own, syncopating my heart beat to match the rhythm of the mouths on screen. I let my back push really nice and firm into the fur jacket I was wearing to clear off the bite of the cold from my skin. It wasn't supposed to be so cool in heaven, but I knew my time was running out, so God might have already cut my central heating since I had failed to pay rent. "What if it was a game?" was what it looked like Fred Astaire was saying to Ginger in the black and white serenity. I lit up my cigarette despite the NO SMOKING signs wallpapering the room. 

It wasn't quite so bad just yet because I was only going to be a fallen angel for eternity, and I kind of liked sky diving when I was alive. 

I had to come up with a name now, because hell doesn't take well to saints, and I was getting awful good at feeling like a sinner. 

"Hey princess," The security guard called, "no smoking eh??" I nodded and snuffed it out on the seat next to me, burning a little hole in the faux-velvet covering. 

Princess. 

It could work. Something like that. 

They turned the lights on and shut off the movie, wordlessly telling me to leave. 

Jesus was waiting by the door, and without saying a single thing, unhooked my wings from my shoulder blades and shook his head sadly. 

"I'll miss you, JC." I said to him. My face was melting off already and he gave me the kind of sad grimace that psychoanalysts give their patients before the institution. 

"Yeah," he muttered, his voice like raw silk and butterscotch, (apparently he sounded different to everyone. He made up the noises of everyone's own paradise.) "I guess I'll see you around, Lucy." 

I thought about a sex change. It always seemed like the devil should be a man. 

oh

"Touch me so that I can be myself"
I'm begging for the longest of your kisses
and your tarnished smile only pointing toward my eager
eagle eyes
because
I can neither live with you nor exist without you.

let me be materialized for another
moment
until the sunshine on your mantle piece
has begun to turn
to the moon
and you tell me that I had better
go.

I really only like the way I feel myself
under your skin and your smile

Trotsky

As the snow began to fall we moved the boxes that you were taping shut so that we could make it from the bed to the kitchen. It had passed more quickly than I could've imagined it might have, and I could still taste all the words I'd failed to say. Whether they held truth or not would stay buried next to my childhood secrets in the shadows of my consciousness, because it looked like you might not stick around to find them out after all.
I had never seen you write so well, nor graph the stars like a cartographer, all heavy on the nighttime and my sins. It must have been upsetting that you never saw the sky with her, but I have set your telescope up right next to my bed so you can hold me while you show me the whole universe.
There was a stain on the new sofa that you flipped over to hide from the landlady who would see it in a couple months and curse you under her breath. There were cigarette butts under everything I moved, wedged into cushions and the nooks and crannies that I thought I'd stuffed up with my secrets when the draft had begun through the walls.
You looked more lovely than the kaleidoscope you bought me after we road tripped to Moscow for the fun of being misunderstood in the least understanding of lands. The rain was thicker there, and it bailed across our windshield like a steady stream of imperial socialism.
"What would Trotsky think?" You muttered, debating how much longer your lungs would last smoking with the windows all rolled up.
When the crash hit the wall and the blood boiled down until it couldn't have been anything human, you stopped smiling.
We are moving boxes like we're out of time, because you're obsessed with your immortality almost as much as I'm obsessed with my death.
And the snow had started falling when I cracked the champagne open with my teeth to propose a toast;
"to you, my love, on the last night of forever."
"What would Trotsky think?" You muttered to yourself as you chugged the champagne til you sparkled and made love to me for the first time in a long, long time.

tie

Last night I dreamt about your favorite tie;

The sun was cracking through your window, which was opaque because of the heat. Morning smelled like pastries and your skin was like a backlit alabaster dream next to mine. I wanted nothing more than to lie there forever with your fingers wrapped in my fingers wrapped in my hair wrapped in your arms in our sheets in your house that I'm calling ours for a second. Hearing your lungs pull for a few more full inhales of oxygen before your eyelids would flutter open and push away serenity, before you would let the tolerance of being a soul in the soulless world weigh down upon your crisping shoulder blades, I could tell you were dreaming of something sad.
I let my lips touch the corners of your extremities, right on your collarbone, right on your cheeks, right on your wrists, until your furrowed brow smoothed out. You began to move like consciousness was stirring in your mouth and, at the same moment, the birds outside began their choir.

You made a noise.
I said good morning.
You kissed me in return.

We sat there for a little while, the sound of your musical city warming up like an orchestra. I sat up to watch the clouds turn on. You watched me.
I tripped over your favorite tie when I was climbing out of bed; the far end stuck to the desk that had caught it when I ripped it off you with my teeth the night before. You chuckled from behind me and I walked away like there had been nothing to see.
When you called me back, I had your coffee in my hand and your tie around my neck and the stains and bruises from last night roped across my skin. You kissed them like they were art. Since you made them, and you're an artist, I guess they were.
Hunting for a wiser frame, just another time of day, you pushed out of bed and disappeared, like you did in all my nightmares. You were gone before I could tell you I loved you enough to wait there all day.
I held onto your favorite tie and fell asleep on your side of the bed.


When I woke up, your tie was gone.

Place

"It's all just a picture."
I asked her why.
"There's nothing real anymore. Everything is the past or tomorrow or right now, which is little more than the act of every breath fading into a memory."
She let her eyes wander into the sunset.
"I'm hoping that it blinds me today."
I couldn't speak.
It only took a second.
It only takes a second every time.
"I  miss being young, when each minute was so much of your life, that being four years old took a millennium. There's something that's so aesthetically pleasing about being young."
I watched her still. She moved her eyes until they fell upwards at the darkness.
"It's all becoming night very quickly."